Monday, September 3, 2012

Why "The Fastest Man On No Legs" Scares the Crap Out of Me

I don’t really care about sports.
Let’s get that out of the way right now. I have respect for most athletes (the
ones that don’t do notably bad things, at least) because of the time they put
in and the lengths they often go to for their chosen sport, but I have no real
interest in playing them, nor do I care who is currently doing the best at
them. As a result, the Olympics mostly passed me by without a second thought.
Sure, America’s swimming and gymnastics teams did fantastically, but we’re one
of the wealthiest nations on Earth; of course our athletes are going to be
among the best. The one story that really did jump out at me was that of Oscar
Pistorius, a South African sprinter who made it into the semifinals and then
finished that semifinal dead last. Why did he jump out at me? Because he was
born with no legs.

I
should clarify: technically, he does have legs, but they end immediately below
the knee like the best-case scenario for a war amputee. (He was in fact born
with legs but due to a congenital deformation of the fibula they were amputated
before he left grade school.) The story of Oscar Pistorius is a classic one; a
tragedy of birth leads to an ostracized childhood, a coach with a bright idea
(giving the boy without feet artificial legs) leads to a spark of hope that
gutters but then burns brighter than ever as he enters his 26th
year. He is an exemplar of what technology can do for the disabled as the
future we were all told was coming finally arrives. I am terrified of him, or
rather I am terrified of what he represents. While again, I have great respect
for him as an athlete, it must be noted that he is a white man from South
Africa. Being a white man is very, very different from being a black man
anywhere in the world, but especially in South Africa, where the shadow of
Apartheid still looms. The springbok boots he wears in the place of feet are
expensive, after all, and learning to walk and run in them requires physical
therapy. Pistorius is from a wealthy family; were a black South African man born the way he was, the odds of him having the same resources and care are incredibly low. Simply put, Oscar Pistorius’
parents bought their way out of having a disabled son.

This
brings me to the main point of this post: I am a transhumanist, someone who
looks to the future and sees not just what technology can do for humanity, but
what technology can help humanity become. I see Oscar Pistorius as a vanguard
of the future. In the future I hope for, disability is an outmoded concept.
Everything wrong with a person can be repaired, or improved upon. “Humanity” is
whatever we define it to be. People who dream larger than I can will alter the
definition of person in ways we can’t currently comprehend (and not in the
legalistic “corporations are people” sense) and quality of life will improve
for everyone. But it’s a long road from where we are now to the future I want
for us. This is why Oscar Pistorius scares me. He’s certainly an impressive
physical specimen; just look at him. But he’s not just in fantastic shape and
powered by an indefatigable drive to succeed in the face of all odds, he’s lucky. Right now the boots he wears are enough to put him on even footing (no
pun intended) with other Olympians; what happens when they make boots that are
uniformly better than organic feet? Olympic judges sparked a firestorm among themselves about this already (And several smaller competitions have barred him from competing outright) so we can at least expect scrutiny there. Writ larger, what happens when the wealthy
can literally buy better bodies for themselves? In everyday life we see how money can often solve problems; what happens when sufficient money solves the problem of sleep? How does a lower-class worker compete with someone who can afford to treat basic human needs like luxuries? This is the dark side of
transhumanism, where instead of equalizing humanity it makes us even less equal
than we were before. The story of Oscar Pistorius has the seeds of both futures
in it; I hope to God we fertilize the right one.